Layout, features and comparison
The first thing you'll notice when you compare this 680i LT SLI board to the more expensive 680i SLI is probably its colour. There's no fancy black PCB here, all the bling's been cast aside, leaving only the bare essentials.The next omission is slightly more important; the third PCIe slot has been removed, leaving rows of phantom solder marks on the board. Much like the colour most people won't notice the change. The third slot was intended for use with a third PCIe graphics card, or a physics card: neither of which are in high demand.
The next thing you're likely to notice is that the funky heatpipe cooler has been replaced with a pair of fans. In some ways this is a boon, because the fans will keep both northbridge and the southbridge nice and cool. The flipside to this is, of course, noise. We found the fans to be noisy. Additionally, the temperature control on our test sample's southbridge fan didn't work: it wouldn't start up if set to less than 100 per cent in the BIOS, so we had to constantly run the fan at full throttle.
As you can see, and in common with the full-blown 680i SLI SKU, NVIDIA's moved 4 of the chipset's 6 SATA2 ports to the middle of the board. Makes sense, we suppose, with powerful (and long-ish) graphics cards expected to populate the PEG x16 slots. There's decent room around the DIMM slots and the power connectors are located nicely, too. Not quite so nicely located are the front-panel connectors, which you can just see wedged between the AUX PEX power header - 4-pin Molex to you or I - and the memory slots.
One of the changes that you can't see here is the change in memory compatibility. The fully fledged 680i SLI will support SLI-Ready memory of upto 1200MHz, as well as 'regular' 800MHz DDR2. The LT version will only support SLI-Ready and regular memory of up to 800MHz.
The above shot highlights the clearance around the CPU socket. As the nForce 680i LT SLI is brand new it's compatible with all of Intel's dual- and quad-core CPUs.
Moving on down to the bottom-left corner, you can see where NVIDIA may have chiselled a little too much from the board in the spirit of cost savings. Gone is the funky and useful debug LED, as well as the on-board speaker. This poses a major problem because there is now no way to troubleshoot the motherboard if you encounter a BIOS error during POST.
The rotated SATA2 and floppy ports have stayed on, though, which saves a little extra space and helps to neaten up case wiring when it comes to installation.
The low-profile southbridge heatsink won't impede aforementioned cards from proper fitment. There are still numerous fan headers, but the handy power and reset switches have disappeared from this trimmed down board.
FireWire400 support is provided by a Texas Instruments ASIC, located directly underneath the second PCIe x16 slot on the far left and just to the right of the BIOS chip.
As we mentioned before, the third PCIe 16x slot has been removed in the LT version. The black-coloured pair can be coupled up to enable SLI; NVIDIA's multi-GPU technology. Both run at x16, electrically, so provide full bandwidth to the requisite cards
A couple of conventional PCI and PCIe x1 expansion ports make up the board's 6-slot configuration, although you'll lose one of each if a couple of double-height graphics cards are used.
Also taking a dive from this cut down board is the second Marvell PCIe ASIC, due to the fact that there's only a single Gigabit Ethernet MAC integrated into the chipset, which, in turn, leaves out NVIDIA's DualNET technology.
Sound's still provided by Realtek's ALC885 HD Codec, which uses the chipset's HD Audio and feeds it into the outputs on the I/O section. We'd like to have seen the Realtek ALC885M-GR codec used instead, as it provides additional support for Dolby Digital Live and Master Studio.
At the back: NVIDIA's decided to stick with optical S/PDIF-Out, however we'd have liked to see a coaxial here, too. For what it's worth, the LT version does away with a couple of USB2.0 ports, bringing the total down to 8.
Overall, then, the board is well laid out, apart from the irritatingly placed front-panel connectors. We also noticed that the front-facing SATA ports aren't of the latching type, which is a pity because the other four do use that style of connector, and the correct cables are included in the box.
Summarising, here's how it stacks up against the full-SLI version:
Comparison
| Mainboard | EVGA nForce 680i SLI LT | EVGA nForce 680i SLI |
|---|---|---|
| PCB colour | Green | Black |
| Processor | All Intel LGA775 processors, including dual- and quad-core models | |
| Official memory support | Up to DDR2-800MHz, SLI-Ready | Up to DDR2-1200, SLI-Ready |
| PCIe slots | 2 (2x 16x) | 3 (2x 16x, 1x 8x) |
| Official FSB support | 1333MHz | |
| Cooling | Dual fans | Heatpipe, with optional fan |
| SATA ports | 6x SATA2 | |
| SATA RAID | 0, 1, 0+1, 5 | |
| ATA channels | 1 | |
| Audio | HDA via ALC885 CODEC | |
| Integrated Ethernet controllers | 1 | 2 |
| USB ports | 8 (4x rear, 4x onboard) | 10 (6x rear, 4x onboard) |
| Onboard devices | LED display, power/reset buttons, speaker | |
| Common form factor | ATX | |
| Expected price | £125 | £165 |